Pierluigi Paganini August 31, 2015

PaloAlto and with WeipTech have identified 92 samples of a new iOS malware family in the wild dubbed KeyRaider that compromised over 225,000 Apple accounts.

Palo Alto networks announced recently that a new iOS malware called KeyRaider allowed crooks to take over more than 225.000 apple accounts on jailbroken iOS devices.

KeyRaider allows the attackers to download applications from the Apple’s Store by using the victim’s credentials, which means that they download a paid software for free.

“We believe this to be the largest known Apple account theft caused by malware.” wrote Claud Xiao of Palo Alto Networks in a blog post, 

Pablo Alto notified Apple with their discovery, but they could not reach Apple’s officials in Sydney.

Jailbroken devices are exposed because lack of the Apple’s protections that limit what apps can be installed on a mobile device.

Xiu told that KeyRaider was been investigated with the help of an amateur technical group in China called WeipTech, and one of the members, a student at Yangzhou University was the person who discovered the attack.

The method used to spread KeyRaider, is to incorporate it into jailbreak tweaks, and in fact, jailbreak tweaks published on the forum Weiphone included KeyRaider.

A user under the pseudonymous of “mischa07” may be the responsible for including KeyRaider to his personal repository of apps.

The same username was found hardcoded into KeyRaider, in the encryption and decryption key of the malicious app.

KeyRaider is capable of steeling Apple accounts, including username and password, intercept the iTunes traffic, and it can be used to fraudulently download the paid apps.

KeyRaider as other features as collecting certificates, private keys and purchase receipts.

Researchers have also discovered that KeyRaider was used for a ransomware attempt, since the malware can “locally disable any kind of unlocking operations, whether the correct passcode or password has been entered,”.

It has been reported that one person had his phone locked and showed a message to contact someone over a QQ instant messaging service:

WeipTech has found the stolen account data on a C&C server used by crooks, the experts breached the server due to some vulnerabilities affecting it, in this way they were able to get the stolen data.

The creators of KeyRaider suspecting that something wrong was happening quickly patched the vulnerability leaving WeipTech with only half of the accounts recovered.

“WeipTech has provided a query service in their website http://www.weiptech.org/ for potential victims to query whether their Apple accounts was stolen. Palo Alto Networks provided the stolen account information to Apple in August 26^.. Worth noting is that WeipTech was only able to recover around half of stolen accounts before the attacker fixed the vulnerability. Users who have ever installed apps or tweaks from untrusted Cydia sources could also be affected.” states PaloAlto.

This case is just one among many others that take advantage of jailbroken phones, and this should be the reason why you shouldn’t jailbroken your production device.

About the Author Elsio Pinto

Edited by Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – KeyRaider, Apple)